Friday, 5 August 2016

Welcome to the UnConventional. The Internet and The Primary Season.

One
of the strange things about moving here at the time I did rather say,
ten or more years ago, is just what the advent of social media has
done to the size of our world.

Now,
I should make the point that I obviously have no problem with the
internet or social media. It is a fantastic tool and I wouldn't have
met my wife without it. It really did change my life. That's why I'm
posting blogs about what its like to live as a British subject in an
American world.

It
can however have another effect, it has made the world appear much
smaller to many people. We live in a world where the borders that
exist between countries and cultures seldom exist in our minds
anymore. No one is a foreigner in the electronic netherworld of the
internet. We take in information, watch videos and form opinions
based on what we find in cyberspace. So, while I try to understand
this new world that I find myself in, I find that many people seem to
already know more about this country than I do while living back in
Blighty. Not that I'm making a judgment on anyone. Its just strange.

I
have tried to stay away from politics while writing this blog, as its
primary purpose is to talk about my adjustment to life here, it is a
blog naturally more concerned with the minutiae of life than the cut
and thrust of political debate. I have a tendency to be more than a
little opinionated when it comes to matters of an ideological bent,
but I'm not totally sure that I have the right to comment on the
rights and wrongs of U.S. politics just yet.

Being
a recent immigrant to these shores, I have a extremely defined legal
status. I am a “conditional permanent resident”. My permanent
residency is as a result of my marriage to Kelly but as we were
married for less than two years when we applied, my residency is of a
conditional nature for its first two years. After that I can apply to
remove the conditional nature of my status.

Permanent
resident status is what many people refer to as possessing a “green
card”. I am required to have my card with me at all times, as it
serves as my I.D. as well as proof of my right to stay in this
country. It has many benefits that I share with U.S. citizens, I can
work, I can pay taxes, I can gain a driver's license etc. However I
have to tell the government every time I move house and I can't vote.

Voting
is a reserve of full U.S. Citizens and I can't even apply to become
one until I have been a full, non conditional permanent resident for
5 years. As I still have a year till I can apply for a change of
status to reach such a categorisation, it means that it will be a
full 6 years, at the very least before I can vote. So not only can I
not vote in this Presidential election but I won't be able to vote in
the one in 4 years time either.

Which
is where the strangeness of the information super-highway hits me.
Here am I, living in America, reluctant to make any comments relating
to social and political issues because my voice really doesn't matter
in the grand scheme of the American political system, if it ever
does. However in the world of social media, everyone has a say in
everything. It seems not to matter that you live 4,000 miles away
from the U.S. because your opinion obviously matters in the coming
Presidential election. And of course, everything posted online is
more trustworthy than things found in the print and television media.

Now
I'm not meaning to judge anyone who posts on this issue, but it shows
just how the world we now live in feels connected like never before.
We see it on the screen and we sympathise with our friends overseas
and so we're going to let our voices be heard. Even if it doesn't
directly affect us at all.

One
of the subjects where this is most evident is in the videos posted
online and the response to the convention season. In the classic,
late 90s-early 2000s TV series “The West Wing”, the White House
Communications Director, Toby Ziegler, attempts to pressure
television networks into guaranteeing coverage of the entire Democrat
Convention in the face of their natural opinion that no one will
watch it. For many years, the convention has been covered less and
less, with only the keynote speeches and candidates acceptance of the
nomination getting any airtime at all. Now however, the Internet
allows for the mass dispersal, promotion and spin of the whole over
stuffed shebang.

This,
of course, has been at least partially influenced, by the fact that
the candidates this year are among the most controversial of recent
years, neither of whom came out of the primary season looking like
undisputed leaders of their parties.

So
welcome to convention season, two weeks which amount to the most
public, most drawn out and by far the most dramatic committee
meetings in the world. Officially that is what they are, a meeting of
each parties national committees where they each have delegates from
every state in the Union and they each nominate their candidate for
election to the highest office in the land. I am discovering in the
midst of watching these conventions and people's reactions to very
carefully selected excerpts of speeches that the Internet, watching
“The West Wing” all the way through on no less than three
occasions and knowing who Ronald Reagan's opponent was in the 1984
election have not prepared me for the experience of viewing this
election from inside this great country.*

The
Conventions however are only a footnote, merely a formality as it
were and therefore the culmination of an entire primary season. By
the time a candidate gets to the convention, they have already been
on the campaign trail in some form or other for the last 18 months
and still have nearly 4 months left to campaign. In answer to the
question of when their journey to this exalted stage of their career
started their speech writers will inevitably have concocted some
heart warming story of the moment in their history when they realised
that they wanted arguably one of the most powerful jobs in the world.
But that is just hype.

Practically
their journey begins with the formation of an exploratory committee.
An exploratory committee's job is to gauge the level of support for
the candidate both within their party and in the country as a whole,
to start to acquire financial capital, no-one after all makes it even
to the candidacy of their party without spending a stupendously large
amount of cash. They also start to create the infrastructure for a
national campaign.

If
the exploratory committee thinks they have a shot then they will
officially launch their campaign for the candidacy of their party.
This is masterminded with just as much attention to detail and often
flamboyance as a national campaign would be. They have a
professionally designed campaign logo, a slogan designed to grab the
public's attention, political directors, speech writers, spin doctors
and media experts. They also have an ideological platform which will
become the basis for their general election campaign position. That
is if they make it to the convention as the nominee, of course.

The
primaries are a battlefield, like any election. The battlefield is
America and the individual battles are for the individual states.
America is a federal republic which means that numerous aspects of
political life are devolved to the states. Article IV of the U.S.
Constitution defines the relationship between the individual states
and the national or “federal” government, at least in theory.
Each state has it's own laws, its own executive (a governor), a
legislature (called numerous things depending on the state but
generally mirroring the two chambered system of the federal Congress
in Washington D.C.) and a judiciary.

The
Republican Party and the Democratic Party are no exception. They have
always been organised on a state level. The building blocks of the
two party system in the United States is often found in the strength
of their “grassroots” state organisations. This means that
although the Office of the President is the executive arm of the
federal government, the first electoral step on the road to it's oval
shaped glory is to convince individual state parties that you should
be their candidate in November.

Now,
this isn't easy, America, for all its patriotic fervour is not some
monolithic imperial power with a group mind that brooks no
disagreement. Each state is motivated by its own issues. My adopted
home state of Wisconsin, for instance, is obviously going to be
extremely interested in the candidates stance on agricultural issues
and awareness of rural and conservational issues as well as the
economy and jobs. However a state like New York, while having a large
rural area within it, will often tend to be more interested in the
candidates stance on social issues directly affecting the inner city,
primarily because the state is dominated by and named after New York
City and its 8 million inhabitants. Water conservation and rights are
going to be of interest to south western states with their dry
climates but of no interest whatsoever to Washington state or Oregon
with their abundance of rainfall.

To
win the primaries therefore, the campaigns have to be ready to run
fifty smaller campaigns for each state's hearts and minds. This was a
revelation to me, even though I knew that, in principle, this was the
way it worked. It turns out that when its your state's turn on the
electoral merry-go-round, especially if yours is the only primary
scheduled for that day, you start to wish that democracy itself
didn't exist. That nobody wanted your votes for anything and that the
candidates would kindly hurry up and get off your commercial breaks.

They
advertise the candidate, like trying to get you to buy a used car.
You are a consumer. Part of a demographic and a state they
desperately need to win and so exposure to the candidates views are a
must, this, after all is the ideological battlefield.

There
are debates and mud slinging, gaffes and mistakes, speeches and less
well intentioned oratory. It becomes a knock down drag out fight just
to gain the chance to do it all again in November. Everyone is
looking for that one vital moment to land the knockout punch and
proceed to the convention as the presumptive nominee. The earlier you
win, of course, the easier you can hide the fact that you verbally
attacked the rest of the candidates from your party and present a
unified front long before the convention winds around.

The
conventions are supposed to exude a kind of celebratory party like
kind of vibe. If the state rounds were all about trying to get the
party to choose a candidate, this is all about showing off the
candidate to the party and showing them that everything is ready for
the general election.

This
years conventions were held in Cleveland, Ohio, (Republican
Convention) and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (Democratic Convention).
The Republican National Committee had tried to inject a feeling of
rock and roll into the proceeding by placing their mascot, an
elephant, onto the silhouette of an electric guitar, referencing the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nearby. This might have worked, if the
Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, hadn't been one of the defeated
challengers in the Republican primary and decided not to attend the
Convention. Meaning that every news story that first day was about
that decision. Not the start that the National Committee would really
want to see. But something that often happens when the Convention
isn't really sure about how committed the winning nominee is to the
party's platform.

The
Democrats had on the other hand gone with the tried and tested
formula,you hold anything in Philadelphia, you use the Liberty Bell
as your logo. And there it was, replacing the “0” in “2016”.
No over the top drama here the first day. The winning nominee for the
Democrats being a woman who many within that party have dreamed of
having on this stage for a long, long time.

The
conventions then proceed as usual, a working weeks worth of speeches,
exhortations, rabble rousing, Bill Clinton talking about cartoons,
Melania Trump talking about fashion and how she loves her Multi,
Multi, Millionaire husband, Meryl Streep squealing like a teenage
girl at a One Direction concert at the prospect of a female
president. Everything is heightened, every emotion is extreme.
America is after all one of the few nations in the world truly
founded on an idea, a concept. Its not just that there is an American
Dream, but that America is the dream and all of these people feel
that it has been lost somewhere, like Richard Nixon dropped it down
the back of the couch one day and nobody's been able to find it
since.

There
is no cynicism to the party faithful that flock to the conventions.
They really do believe that they are the only ones who can save the
American dream. They turn a blind eye to the failings of their
nominees (because all politicians have failings) and the whole thing
becomes a beatification, the nominee raised to sainthood, the
standard bearer of their party. The opposing parties candidate now is
seen in the opposite way. Like an enemy to the true fulfillment of
the dream, at best a sadly deluded personage who should really have
stayed at home.

There
are many who believe that this election could be incredibly close,
despite the Republican candidates tendency to indulge in silly posts
on Twitter that help his campaign very little. People in the U.K. and
that includes many who have become entitled to have an opinion by
watching You Tube videos, wonder how that can be. The Democratic
candidate comes across as a much more sensible bet, surely she's
going to walk it. Why isn't she doing a victory lap already?

The
fact it is, as the primaries are conducted on a state level so, to a
degree is the general. Each state has a series of votes attached to
it. In the same way as the primaries decide how the delegates will
vote at the National Convention, these decide how the Electoral
College will vote.

In
the days before instantaneous communication, the Presidential
election was decided by delegates to an Electoral College sent from
their state to vote in Washington D.C. for the candidate their state
had voted for. States with larger populations got more delegates than
states with smaller populations. It was considered the only way to
hold the election on the same day everywhere and get reliable
results. Now although things have changed in terms of communication,
the Electoral College still exists. This means a simple majority of
votes in the country will do, you have to win states across the
board.

This
is where things could potentially get a lot closer. The Democrats
have for many years easily taken the East and West Coasts. This means
they take the largest state in terms of electoral college votes,
California and also New York. They succeed in large cities and urban
areas, but the American system is set up so that smaller rural states
can't be ignored and have a say. And as the Republicans just as
invariably take the second largest electoral college state of Texas.
It forces candidates to have to listen to everyone in the country not
just their natural voters.

The
states in the centre of the country are often referred to as “Flyover
States” because the Democrats have tended to ignore their issues
while flying from their power bases on the East and West Coasts.
These states have not always been fertile ground for the Democratic
party and many that once had industrial cities within them blame the
Democratic candidate for her agreement with her husband's signing of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which they feel
destroyed manufacturing in America's heartland. They don't want food
to be cheaper for inner city children because they have farms that
need a fair price to survive. They also feel that all the money they
pay in taxes to the Federal government goes predominantly on inner
city areas with social problems that they don't have. They own guns
for hunting, but feel vilified for possessing them by the anti gun
lobby when they feel the real gun problem in the U.S. is with
unregistered gun owners in the inner cities.

So
this is the strangeness I find, we sit now on our computers and make
decisions about candidates and politicians across the world based on
our own ideologies defined by our own lives. I may listen to the
Republican candidate and find much of what he says repugnant but I
can't deny the fact that many in the heartland of America, couldn't
care less about what he says about those issues so long as he brings
prosperity back to them. There is an area known as the Rust Belt, it
is made up of former manufacturing towns whose jobs have trickled
away, Detroit, for instance, once provided much of America with its
cars, now many worry that it could become a ghost town. There are
many who hold the Democratic candidate at least partially responsible
for this state of affairs. Many also feel that although the current
President has done a lot for the big cities he has done little for
rural areas and states which are majority rural.

So
maybe this, I feel, is what I'm learning, the Internet has a great
potential to inform us, to teach us, to show us the future and
inform us of the past. It also, however robs us of our experience of
the world around us. We no longer try to find out what the people
around us think because so many of our friends are now like minded
individuals who live on the internet making us feel like everyone in
the world thinks the same as we do.

I
am here in the midst of this country, trying to understand its many
different ways and cultural peculiarities. I'm not sure which way I
would actually vote in the long run. I know that for many this year,
its going to come down to which of the candidates is despised least.
The lesser of two evils. I am learning that sometimes the Internet
allows us to get flippant about issues that many people take
incredibly seriously and which affect many lives.

I
have no judgment to pass on anyone. I can be as guilty of this as
anyone can be. I just wonder whether the next time we find some video
of a politician speaking in another country about things that we
can't hope to truly experience, we seek to learn more, not put the
video on our Facebook feed and say “I'll just leave this here...Mic
Drop”, no matter how amusing the man's orange hair-do is.

2 comments:

I'm trying to figure out which alignment you'd fall into -so I'm going to say lawful neutral. You can easily strip away all bias from subject matter and truly put things into a perspective that only other neutrally aligned persons, can fathom. I enjoyed reading your rambling and I appreciate your input.

Thank you very much, I appreciate that! I try to be as neutral as I can because I'm trying to explain things as an outsider. I'm also not sure that I have the right to tell people what they should think.